Chop Fry Watch Learn (Michelle T. King)

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice“This delicious book is a must-read for cooks and food lovers.” ?Lizz Schumer, PeopleA spirited new history of Chinese food told through an account of the remarkable life of Fu Pei-mei, the woman who brought Chinese cooking to the world. In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor that would last four decades. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother’s copies of Fu Pei-mei’s Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu’s story and in her food, a vivid portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class, female home cooks navigated the tremendous postwar transformations taking place across the world. In Chop Fry Watch Learn, King weaves together stories from her own family and contemporary oral hist